Re: [PATCH] makefile: teach git about NO_MSGFMT (as supported in GUI and gitk)

On Thu, Sep 02 2021, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

On Thu, Sep 02 2021, Carlo Marcelo Arenas Belón wrote:

quoted

NO_MSGFMT can be used to indicate there is no msgfmt available, so
make git recognize that and avoid failing to build while trying to
generate i18n files.

Why would we want to avoid failing the build if we don't have msgfmt?

I understand why you'd want NO_GETTEXT in that case, but what's the
point of building with NO_GETTEXT= NO_MSGFMT=Y?

If we can't build the *.mo files we'll have a completely broken
installation that can't do anything useful with gettext, so why not just
build without gettext at that point?

When this patch is applied a lot of things related to gettext in our
tests fail if you build with NO_GETTEXT= NO_MSGFMT=Y, because those
things are assuming that if NO_GETTEXT isn't defined we'll have the *.mo
files, po/build etc.

Some further digging reveals that we've got in-tree git-gui/po/po2msg.sh
and gitk-git/po/po2msg.sh (copy/pasted, but slightly different) that
supports some subset of "msgfmt --tcl".

I.e. those programs with NO_MSGFMT still ends up with locae files they
can use, whereas in this patch we don't end up with anything at all...